Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

Is my 301 redirect working?

Very simple question here . I've redirected a bunch of older pages with decent ranking to some newer pages on my site, using the Thesis theme's built-in redirect function.

However, in the SERPS, the older pages (and, importantly, older titles) still show up. When clicked on, they redirect to the new page, but it's still irritating because the older titles make the site look out of date.

Is this Working As Intended, or have I or my theme done something wrong? And if it's the latter, what's the best way to achieve a redirect, preferably with a Wordpress plugin?

I have run into issues with Wordpress plugins in the past (ones that do various things!) and for important stuff like 301's, I tend to prefer working in .htaccess manually, as I can see what it is happening, and see how to fix any issues easier.

If you run into the issue whereby you are doing massive amounts of 301's, it is sometimes possible to do re-write rules on the URL structure to effect large amounts of 301's, however this can be a bit more involved ;)

Anyway, glad you got it sorted - did you check them with the http header check tool? (there are a few like that tool I linked to in case you prefer others, simply google: http header status tool

And that should give you a few (just letting you know in case you either prefer others, or if that one goes down when you need it ever).

2) TEST to ensure you get the correct header status (301 permanently moved)

3) Google eventually crawls the old page, and finds the 301 redirect

4) After some time, Google replaces the old URL with the new URL.

Now, as for speeding things up, in my opinion (born out by testing), counter to your idea of adding the new URL to webmaster tools, it is better to get Google to find the actual 301 redirect, before the new url ;) (this way, Google won't see the new URL as a duplicate, before it finds the old, now 301 redirected, URL, which in theory 'could' happen if both pages had the same content/title tag, etc - Although with just 1 or 2 redirects, it is quite unlikely, and should resolve itself pretty quick).

So what I like to do, is try to get Googlebot to the old (301'd) page as soon as possible once it has been implemented (and tested!).

To do this, consider pinging the URL, or pinging your RSS feed (if your site has them) - Tweet about the fact you did a redirect, and link from twitter to the old URL, or even, if you have done some website redesign, write a press release about it, and within the PR, link to the old page... Basically, anything to get google old Googlebot to crawl the old URL< and find the 301 redirect ;)

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.